| The Order of the Shepherd’s Heart is an ecumenical and yet catholic religious community with deep Celtic Christian roots. Shepherd’s Heart is a diverse order with people from many different Christian denominations. We are an ecumenical order, while we offer a church home to those looking for such, we also encourage people to remain in their current denomination while joining our fellowship and community. Our group is still very small with only a handful of brothers and sisters located primarily in the Ozark mountains living in an intentional community but we do have several sister communities scattered to the four corners of the United States.
We Are Inclusive: Believing as Saint Isaac of Syria, “Do not try to discriminate the worthy from the unworthy, but let all people be equal in your eyes for a good deed,” we do not discriminate and hold no regard for a person’s race, color, age, gender, sexual orientation, preference, nationality, socioeconomic class, nor a person’s state of grace. We are fully committed to inclusivity and our support for the LGBTQIAPP (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, questioning, intersexual, asexual, pansexual, polyamorous) and anyone who would seek to find a spiritual home within the Shepherd’s Heart is unwavering and unapologetic.
We strive to be a model of ecological living as well as a example of what it means to be a Christian, following the Prince of Peace in the 21st century. We are committed to nonviolence, egalitarianism, and the breakdown of culturally constructed gender roles.
Love one another as Christ first loved us! Love is who and what we are and the “merciful heart” is our vision. We are the Order of the Shepherd’s Heart, followers of the Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ, sharing our very lives with one another as we attempt to live out together the Beatitudes and the Two Great Commandments which our Lord Jesus gave us, to be for us an example of the Christian way of life. We are a community of adults who accept this Rule and the disciplines of our community life freely, as we attempt to become, with each other, more fully human, more fully alive to God’s presence in us, in all other persons, and in his splendid creation.
Our Order is not simply one of brick and mortar but rather of tribal or familial connection that calls us to share with each other the “pasture of our lives.” Though the Shepherd’s Heart may have a central gathering location such as an abbey, the continual focus is one of a “community without walls” or a “pasture without fences” so that we may truly “bring back the wandering.”
The Order does not exist to govern every detail of the members’ lives, but to provide support and love, direction and shared experience, encouragement and constructive criticism in our never-ending quest to become “the glory of God: the human person fully alive.”
True to our motto: “Rege quod est devium – bring back the wandering” we strive to offer safe pasture and sanctuary within our Order for all wandering Christians who would seek a more intimate union with God and his or her neighbor. To these ends we offer our Order to any and all who would want to struggle with us to live such a life of “intentional intimacy,” being radically inclusive and turning no one away.
The Order of the Shepherd’s Heart is an ecumenical covenant community fostered by Christ’s Catholic Church and composed of men and women in single, celibate, and married lifestyles called as a domestic and monastic spiritual family into deep love relationships with and in Jesus Christ. Jesus is our example; the Scriptures are our Rule; love is our law.
The foundation of this Order is Love. In order to assure that this divine love is not simply misdirected human emotion, it is guided by divine truth. It is formed and fostered by a balanced life of prayer, study, and apostolic service.
The major expression of this foundation of love is integration. As such, we integrate all religions from a Christian base, all Christian denominations from a catholic base, and all religious and monastic traditions from a Celtic base. Celtic spirituality is our mother, but we are children born from it into the world in which we find ourselves. We see our Order as a reconciling agent in the world, integrating a call to solitude with a call to community, a call to contemplation with a mandate from the Gospel to the evangelical life. We also integrate various conditions of life into one spiritual community.
While recognizing the goodness of all creation and humankind, the life of the community is intentionally counter-culture. We are an alternative society living within and alongside the modern secular society, without being a part of it. We are also an expression of renewal and reform within the Church.
We do all of this by simply seeking to live the life of Christ and his apostles, integrating harmoniously those seeming opposites into a manifest and living whole. Committed to a more intense service of Christ, the Church, and the world, the brothers and sisters direct their whole lives toward revealing the glory of God in the world, and caiming the world for God. In word and work we give witness to the presence of Christ and the eminent and sure manifestation of His Kingdom.
It has been our long term goal to build an abbey and live in a self-sustaining intentional community or eco-abbey, as we like to call it, with our brothers and sisters who would seek such a lifestyle in which to live our their calling. It is due to that vision that we have continued to look for land within a suitable geographical area that would meet our various needs and or desires.
We would like to acquire as close to 100 acres as possible on which to build an eco-friendly, Christian egalitarian community, based upon our Rule of Common Life – a community that enjoys decision making through consensus and one committed to fostering acceptance, diversity, faith, hope, liberty, justice, peace, and love, all of which are central themes of the Gospel message.
Many of our members are craftspeople, artisans, writers, et cetera and currently make a living by their own hands. Being made in the image of the Creator we all feel a strong need to be “little creators” following His example and we hope to cooperatively offer that as a continued financial source of sustainability for our community as a whole.
Some of our specific needs would be: that a portion of the land be suitable for organic farming, that it be located within a 30-40 minute commute to labor and service markets as well as medical services. Ideally we would like to be in an area or county where building codes are either nonexistent or at least friendly toward alternative building materials and structures.
The core of our group is currently located in Southwest Missouri just across the border from Northwest Arkansas and because of that we have primarily looked for land within the Ozarks but have recently widened our search to include other states as well.
As with most ministries we are funded by donation alone and so we would be blessed to have the land donated to us but outside of the land being donated by a kind patron, we would need either owner financing and or a contract for deed. We’re open to ideas and payments.
If you have land or know someone who does and would like to offer it to us, please feel free to contact us. We welcome your comments, questions, suggestions, and most assuredly your prayers.
We believe very strongly that where God guides, He provides, and we wait on that provision as we continue on serving Him by serving His people. Status: Seeking Members | Community location is placed at the center of the zip/postal code, city/state, or city/country (not based on street addresses) |
